In Martinsburg, W.Va., she was Monique Watson, a Hurricane Katrina victim who had lost everything and was running from a stranger who held her captive in a home, raping her repeatedly.

In Oakland, Calif., they knew her as Danielle Jones, the adopted daughter of abusive parents who left her Chicago home with no money or identification.

Both times, her clever stories garnered sympathy from people in all walks of life. She worked. She dated. She had friends. She became part of a family.

In Martinsburg, hotel manager Bipin Patel made sure she had clothing and a place to stay. “I felt sorry for her,” he said. “She was really friendly, especially to my customers. They liked it. She’s excellent.”

In Oakland, hairdresser Leemu Topka still thinks of her as a daughter. “I cried for her, and that’s why I really opened up my heart to her,” Tokpa said. “I’m so hurt, and I’m crying for her, and I wish she could come back to me. She is a family to me. I don’t consider her somebody else.”

For two years, she lived with Tokpa, working in her African hair salon, learning the trade. Eating meals with Tokpa’s kids. Doing chores. Building a client base at the salon, and becoming a part of the family.

Her story is a little unconventional from a police perspective. Many people who run from crimes run from really big ones, such as murder or rape. Most of them are men.

Michelle McMullen of Harrisburg is charged with theft by deception, accused of stealing $20,000 from a Susquehanna Township church where she worked and using the money to pay for school, authorities said. It’s likely she never would have gone to prison.

And most who run get caught sooner than this. They keep the same name and move around a lot.

Michelle ditched her whole life in the passenger seat of her black 2002 Honda Accord.

She faked her disappearance.

She spent 28 months on the run, never speaking of her son, who was 6 years old when she left. She told no one about her two loving parents.

Instead, she led others to believe that she was abandoned, abused and in desperate need of help. And she let her family think she had vanished and possibly was in dangerous hands, a mystery that drew national attention almost from the start.

“I decided to leave,” she wrote in a police confession when she was caught in January. “I really didn’t have a plan. But I knew I didn’t want to face what was happening in Pennsylvania. I left the little amount of money I had with this girl for my son, and I drove my car until I ran out of gas. I think I left my car in Maryland. I left my wallet and my keys in the car, and I just walked away.”

A wave of worries

In September 2008, Susquehanna Township police Detective Michael Thornton said he called Michelle McMullen and left a voicemail: Progress-Immanuel Presbyterian Church, from which she was fired for poor performance in July, had checked its books and found she had forged checks and made unauthorized pay raises to herself during the two years she worked there.

Michelle was a 27-year-old student at Grambling State University in Louisiana who had just moved south with her son to finish a few courses after taking the majority of her classes online from Harrisburg. But she was silently having money problems.

Michelle took a job at a McDonald’s to try to keep up with her bills and talked to her parents about sending her son back to live with them. It was decision time.

Fast-forward nearly three years, when she was caught. Michelle told police she spent every day with knots in her stomach, worried about being caught. It was her own private jail cell.

But that Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, when Michelle got an unexpected day off from work at McDonald’s, she made a decision to pack up her boy and secretly drive 18 hours through the night to the midstate. She left her child with a friend and made the woman promise to say nothing until Tuesday morning.

Michelle got right back on the road. She took Interstate 81 south and drove until her car ran out of gas near a Volvo truck plant in Hagerstown, Md. She abandoned her car, her keys, her ID, her purse, money, wallet — everything, including a budget that showed she was running out of money for classes.

She walked away.

By Monday, the woman watching Michelle’s son was worried. She phoned Michelle’s parents, who immediately called Harrisburg police to report Michelle missing. Using their copy store as a command center, they posted fliers around the neighborhood, asking anyone who had seen Michelle to come forward.

Lillie and Michael McMullen feared their daughter might have fallen asleep behind the wheel during the long drive or suffered a migraine headache and crashed.

She could be a Jane Doe patient in any hospital between the midstate and Louisiana. She could be trapped in her car out of sight of passing traffic. Or worse, she could have become a victim — vulnerable and weary from the treacherous trip.

That fear seemed real seven days later, when authorities found Michelle’s car abandoned on the side of the interstate near the Volvo truck plant in Maryland.

To her father, the only explanation was that Michelle was forcibly removed.

But police were developing a different theory. The friend who had been watching Michelle’s son turned over a note scribbled from Michelle that said she needed time to think.

‘Missed her by minutes'

It was becoming more clear that Michelle was not missing. She was running.

Police dogs, helicopters and firefighters converged on the area where her car was found, but Michelle evaded the search. She spent several months homeless, slipping away from police who were strained for good tips.

In November 2008, the TV show “America’s Most Wanted” posted a blurb about her on its website, but no leads came from that, either.

It wasn’t until Dec. 15, 2008, when a McMullen family friend walked into the Knight’s Inn in Martinsburg, W.Va., and spotted a familiar face working behind the counter. She recognized him, too.

Monique Watson, as Michelle called herself, scurried to a back room, told employees she had to deliver a message to a housekeeper and vanished as the family friend called the McMullen family. Michelle’s mother notified Harrisburg police, who called officers in Martinsburg.

The chain of telephone calls lasted minutes — 10, 15 tops, said Thornton, the detective. But when police got to the hotel, she was gone. “They missed her by minutes,” Thornton said.

Bipen Patel, manager at the Knights Inn, told police he met Monique when she was staying at a different hotel, near the Maryland border. She told him she was hiding from an abusive man in Louisiana. Patel wanted to help her.

“She was crying and said, ‘Somebody abused me in Louisiana,’ and they wouldn’t let her out of the house,” Patel said. “Some guy was abusing her every day. I said I can help you with some money, but I can’t hire you. We just had a trade. I give you some money and you help me out.”

It makes sense to Patel, looking back, how Monique resisted when he called a social worker behind her back, trying to help her get some legal paper work. “He came and [Monique] said: ‘Please, I don’t need it. Please don’t talk to him.’ She was crying,” Patel said.

Patel had grown suspicious of how fast she picked up on computer skills, but he bought her a laptop and allowed her access to his credit cards and other equipment. He said she never stole a cent. “Not a penny. She never did anything wrong to me,” Patel said. “If she’s that kind of person, she had two, three weeks, she could take money, she had checkbooks.”

When she hastily ran out that night, Michelle ditched Monique and started over. But she left behind clues. She had been searching for ways to get a fake ID, police said.

“There was a letter that she had written about how she claimed to be a Katrina victim,” Thornton said. “At the time, Hurricane Katrina was still a lot in the news.”

‘She’s like my daughter’

Michelle caught a train to Washington, D.C., the night she was spotted in Martinsburg, but it wasn’t long before she came back to the Maryland-West Virginia line area to stay with a guy she had met.

She began browsing online dating sites and decided she would move to California to meet up with a new man: Ibrahim Mumuni. In January 2009, she booked an Amtrak ticket to Emeryville, Calif., and went west. She told Mumuni she was Danielle Jones, a native of Liberia who had moved to Chicago at age 3.

In California, Danielle moved around a bit — spending time in Piedmont and Hayward before settling in Oakland. She had roommates, and got a job at the Creative African Braids and Beauty shop, a Korean-run salon owned by Leemu Topka.

“She is a sweet person. Very sweet, very nice,” Topka said. “She said she wanted me to teach her how to do hair. I said OK.”

Danielle started on the mannequins and gradually moved to heads of hair on people.

Her relationship with Topka matured, too. “We were together like family. It was not like work,” Topka said.

Danielle said she had no family, that she had run from her adoptive parents in Chicago because her father abused her. “She told me she don’t have a kid. I called her my daughter. She always called me Mommy,” Topka said. “All I know in my mind is that she’s like my daughter.”

Danielle built up a client base. The customers really liked her, Topka said.

She told people that she wasn’t a citizen and that her wallet had been stolen on a bus. Police say Mumuni wanted to help her get paper work, but she resisted.

She talked her way out of a minor traffic stop with police and was even able to keep a low profile for 12 months after being featured on the Investigation Discovery show “Disappeared.” The show had reached out to local police and the McMullen family, and aired an hourlong profile in January 2009.

“She avoided the police,” Thornton said. “And kept to herself and claims not to have known about the TV show, never Googled herself during that time frame. She told us that.”

Topka recalls how two women came into the salon, asking to look at a wig cap. “They were checking her, but I had no clue,” Topka said.

They were undercover police.

Danielle rang them up, and they left. But minutes later, the full-uniformed officers returned. They pulled Danielle into a back room and began to question her.

And they started asking Topka who Danielle was to her. “I said she was my daughter,” Topka said. “We were so close no one knew that she was not my daughter.”

Danielle was handcuffed and taken to the police station for fingerprinting to prove who she was.

It was Jan. 27. Michelle was outed and on her way back to Harrisburg.

Topka was devastated.

“I tried to check on her, but the name I had was different,” Topka said. “I don’t like to think about it. It’s something I have to think about because it’s still in my memory. I’m hurt, but no matter how the situation is, she’s still a person who is my daughter.”

It turned out that the hard work Danielle put in at that salon ended up giving her away. One of her clients recognized her as Michelle after watching a rerun of the Investigation Discovery show.

“I was shocked when I heard all these things about her, because these are things I didn’t see in her,” Topka said.

Michelle still talks to Topka through letters, and Mumuni said he has contact with the McMullen family — her real family. “She’s a good kid,” he said. “I love her.”

‘She’s not some villain’

The lies, the avoidance — it was all necessary for survival.

Michael and Lillie McMullen aren’t hurt or disappointed. “Let’s not portray [her son] as a child whose life has fallen apart because his mother disappeared,” her father, Michael McMullen, said. “Sure he missed his mother and had genuine concerns, but he’s always believed she would come back one day and be reunited, which she did.”

One of the first things Michelle did when she came back was sit down with her son. “He said, ‘Yeah, she got some explaining to do with me,’” her father said. “And she did. And he was glad to hear it.”

Michael McMullen said his daughter endured “pretty horrific” things while she was away. “She didn’t say, ‘I’m just going to fall off the face of the earth for three years,’” he said. “It’s not something that was thought out or intended as a way of evading. One thing led to the other, and it spiraled out of control. She endured and suffered and had to contend with difficulties in life that any penalty and incarceration would not near have matched.”

That’s her reality now.

The irony of Michelle’s story is that even if found guilty, she probably would not have spent any time behind bars had she stayed and faced her alleged crimes in 2008. There are cases of white-collar theft for far more money in which defendants are sentenced to probation as long as they pay back the money.

“She’s already served more time than guidelines call for,” Michael McMullen said. “She’s not some villain that needs to be holed down in her situation because of an error in judgment that she’s made.”

If convicted, Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. said, Michelle likely will be sentenced to the time she’s served.

But bail isn’t based on that. It’s about the likelihood someone will show up for her next court hearing. And that works against Michelle. Because she’s considered a flight risk, Michelle has spent four months behind bars, waiting for a trial that hasn’t been scheduled.

Her father says Michelle has always admitted to cashing two “extra” paychecks, which came to her accidentally in 2008. She used them only to pay for school, he said. The rest of the missing money was the result of bad accounting practices that Michael McMullen says were already in place at the Progress-Immanuel church. “This blew out of proportion,” he said.

And he says her run wasn’t calculated and cold, like it’s been portrayed. Michelle was young and impulsive, and she felt incredible shame because her mother is a pastor, he said.

“People do some of the darnedest things,” Michael McMullen said. “You never know how people react under sudden stress and pressure. They say and do things that are hard to take back.”

The family is refusing to dwell on what happened but is instead focusing on helping Michelle rebuild. “We’re going to work with her, get her back on her feet and help her get her life on track,” her father said. “We certainly want people to understand she’s not a villifiable person. She’s truly a good person who made a mistake.”

When she got back to Dauphin County in March, Michelle told Detective Michael Thornton that she hadn’t shared her real story with anyone while on the lam.

“I am very ashamed to say that I never called my parents to tell them that I was OK,” she wrote in a statement. “I knew that if I talked to my parents, they’d convince me to go back home, and I was still afraid.”

She said in a letter written from her Dauphin County jail cell that she can’t talk about her story right now. Her attorney did not return repeated calls for comment.

Her father said the family is fielding interest from national media and for book deals.

Michelle will tell her story in her own words eventually, he said.

“I’m grateful that my parents never gave up on me,” she wrote in a statement for police. “I was not encouraged to leave Pennsylvania, I was not kidnapped or forced to stay somewhere that I didn’t want to be. The choices I made to leave were mine and mine alone.”

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